Is that even all of them? Why do you guys have so many different types of special forces?
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The missions they were designed for, and the history. For the most part each one of them was set up at a certain point in time to do a specific type of job – like the Green Berets for guerrilla and counterinsurgency training and the SEALs for scouting beaches and removing mines. Fast forward to modern times where certain kinds of work, like raids on terrorist compounds, become really common and it can seem like the units are redundant. The truth is there is/was plenty of work to go around.
Part of it is inter-service politics. The Marines famously didn’t want to have a special operations unit. “There are no elite Marines, for the Marine Corps itself is elite” was their thinking. But that tune changed rather quickly when they found themselves left out of those missions and the funding that came with them.
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